TheSnackHound

Then Great American Seafood Cookoff may be over, but the voting, for the folks at home, has just begun.   Five top recipes have been chosen and we get to vote for our favorite.  Just click on the red box at GreatAmericanSeafoodCookoff.com to vote and also be entered to win a trip to New Orleans.

The event was such a great way to promote domestic seafood and the unique flavors that will knock your socks off if you haven’t ventured away from your fish sticks.  Growing up along the Great Lakes, I could name at least 10 varieties of edible fish that the family regularly ate, by the time I was five.   Looking at the stores shelves as an adult, I am stuck with salmon, cod, grouper, or “fish sticks.”   I can see why people don’t experiment!

You may take it for granted, but I have flipped over the packages at the grocery store of local varieties of fish, and notice so much is from or packaged in Thailand or China! They are also injected with solution and “spices” that do not all have to be disclosed.  I couldn’t help but wonder just how long that fish had been sitting before it came into the store, and it just seems unnatural to raise fish that are not native to ship back to sell in their native land.  It just can’t be as healthy, and they all start to taste the same.  With the local seafood that kept me healthy during my childhood, I not only knew what lake or river they came from, but I knew the name of the person who caught them too!

Since it takes me years, it seems, to decide what to order at a restaurant because there are so many things that I like, I knew that this would be no simple task for me.    I was torn between choosing a cook off recipe I personally would like to eat, and what I thought was truly original.

Here are the two I have neck and neck and that I will agonize about all day long before I vote:

- Colorado Striped Bass Panzanella from Colorado’s Paul Anders, but I was a little uneasy about the choice of using hybrid bass.  Maybe it is a false assumption, but I assume since it says “hybrid” and not “fish from an inter-fish marriage” I would imagine it was farm raised. That is a no no for me. However, if this recipe is “that good,” I may be able to substitute for a similar fish if I was making it myself.

- Texas Shrimp. They just “grow em bigger” in Texas like everything else! The whole state of Texas (and the recipe comes from Texan Mark Holley) seems to be in here.  You have Gulf Shrimp, hominy, pricky pear juice, and more.  Could I actually make this dish, even though I love shrimp?  Finding a few ingredients near me may be a bit more of a science project.

Visit Greatamericanseafoodcookoff.com and cast your vote for your favorite! Write in and tell me what you chose!

Our friend Nancy baked us a cake!   I was so excited about that!   I know she was feeling badly after the rough patch we had but the truth remains: I haven’t changed much since I was five years old:  I can be bribed with chocolate cake, especially if it has whipped cream anywhere near it.

There are two tips that can make any boxed mix cake taste homemade:

1) Right when the cake comes out of the oven, place waxed paper over it while still in the pan.  This locks the moisture in and takes away that “dry brownie effect.”

If you don’t know what a horror a dry cake can be, just read “My Name is Mud Cake” 

2) Make an easy frosting.  Mix half and half of a commercial chocolate frosting, and either real whipped cream or whipped dessert toping.   This will make a very moist chocolatey topping for your sheet or pan cake.

I was amazed that she actually told me these secrets.  (I am still alive!)

The Great American Seafood Cook off 2008 is right around the corner. Actually, it is this weekend, August 2-3 in New Orleans. I know, I didn’t give you much notice, but if you are in the eastern United States, you can get in your car right this very minute, and you will get there in plenty of time. Of course, you might need a shower because you drove straight through the night, but I promise you can still make it.

I have lived in three different parts of the country and the seafood is very different from region to region, not just in the selection of native species, but in the actual recipes. Whether caught off of the dock in the backyard or brought from the ocean, everyone thinks the way they prepare it is best.

One thing is pretty universal whether you are landlocked or oceanside. Every dinner party starts off with a shrimp ring. Depending on how far you are from the gulf, or from a large grocery store chain, you either get four shrimp in a wine glass for twenty bucks, or get several pounds on ice with a saucer of cocktail sauce for the same price.

I always wonder why something simple is so easy to ruin. The standby for restaurants is to slather them with Old Bay seasoning and serve them peel and eat style. That may be fine, but it necessitates a trip to the bathroom to scrub your fingernails. Certainly, this is not a matter for business lunches or blind dates.

The other popular way is to serve it with cocktail sauce. The last time I went to the store, I was amazed at how much sodium was in cocktail sauce! One had 900 mg, and one had 650 per serving size, which was basically a spoonful. By the time you ate a real serving, a doctor would come to the table and prescribe you blood pressure medicine on the spot.

The simplest recipe I have found is as follows:

Buy Ketchup
Buy a jar of horseradish
Put the ketchup on a dish and mix horseradish to taste.

Do not do this in any greater than a one to four ratio or you will burn your mouth out. It is better to add a smaller amount and increase it. Your guests will tell you that its the best cocktail sauce they have had in a long time, as their bodies do not know what hit them without having xanthan gum and the like to contend with, but don’t tell them its just ketchup.

Do you have any other ideas that you have used to improve on the ever popular “peel and eat” shrimp or shrimp cocktail concept, or is this something so perfected and simple there is just no variation? I wonder if the chefs at the CookOff would come up with something that a regular person could tackle. Maybe they would be bored or would really be itching to make something more complicated than that. I certainly think that if I showed up with my ketchup packets and little jar of horseradish, they would wonder how I actually thought I would be taken seriously. Little do they know that is really just about my speed.

What would your take on an old standby be?

I used to love getting the tableside “Caesar Salad” making service.   At some upscale restaurants, usually Bananas Foster is another dish that is made tableside.    You might not expect someone to come to your table and make drinks, however.

When we were kids, there were occasions that much of the whole family would go out to a restaurant.  It may be after a funeral, on the way home from the fair, or whatever the case may be.   Somehow, the parents allowed myself and a few of my cousins to sit at a table together against their better judgement.   We were not bad children (so we say).  We didn’t run around.  We were the kids who were more likely to be “a little too quiet.”   Inevitably, though, there would be culinary creations emanating from our table.  Yes, even at a Big Boy’s restaurant there was enough to work with.  All of those tantalizing caddies of additives and jellies awaited us.

My brother always ordered a glass of water with lemon, and then would confiscate the lemons from everyone else, not proud to ask at the “grown up” tables as well.  He would take the sugar packets lined in their little caddy, too.   With sugar granuals liberally littering the table, he squeezed and mixed his own lemonade.   Usually, it took half a glass of tasting to get the ratio of sugar, water, and squeezed lemon wedges just right.  He would then declare his creation a masterpiece and pedal his wares to the several tables our extended family took up.

Oddly enough, he got few special orders.

Here is how hand squeezed lemonade is supposed to go:

1 cup sugar (white.  No fancy schmancy stuff or your lemonade is going to be awfully crunchy)
6 lemons
6 cups of water
6 cups cold water

Squeeze the lemons, pour the juice in a pitcher, add the sugar, and stir in 6 cups of cold water.   If you really rather prefer your water temperature not be dictated to you, and you like warmed over lemonage, go for an alternative temperature.   If you think that is not enough sugar, just go to town, but it will surely be to your taste and not mine.

Actually, since the ratio is 6 to 1 seems to be the golden mean of lemonade,  maybe my brother was actually not so far off. If he combined all the lemon slices and it added up to one whole lemon, I could imagine he could dump enough of those sugar packets to make approximately 1/6 of a cup of sugar.

On the way home, we crashed in the car due to not only the ratio but the sheer volume of sugar that was consumed through a straw througout the evening, even though our breath and hands and sleeves smelled as refreshing as lemon scented Pledge. Our parents didn’t need car air fresheners. When you are doing this level of experimenting, you drink your mistakes.

For every birthday, I made a special request to have a Mud Cake. What is a Mud Cake? The more proper name is “Chocolate Pudding Cake” but my grandmother made it when my cousins and I were little, and the name stuck.

It is a very simple recipe, involving a standard cake mix and a box of cooking pudding. I decided that I was going to make it to impress my boyfriend. He is my husband now, so apparently I did not poison him. I certainly came close that night.

I called Grandma up to proudly tell her what I was doing. I bought the cake mix and the pudding, and followed the package to a “T”. I had my egg and flour out, made the cake mix and then stirred in a box of the pudding.

As it was cooking, I noticed something didn’t look quite right, but I chalked that up to performance anxiety. When I brought it out to cook, I noticed that one side of the cake was only about a centimeter high, where the other edge almost was as tall as the lip of the pan.

My boyfriend came over, and tasted the cake.

“What is this supposed to be? A brownie?,” he said.

“No. It is supposed to be Chocolate Pudding Cake. The one that my Grandma makes.”

Inspired by his looks of incredulity and a cake texture that the NHL would be begging me to reveal to them to use to make practice pucks, I called Grandma up.

Then she laid it on me:

I was supposed to MAKE THE PUDDING. When it was thoroughly stirred, I was to stir in one chocolate cake mix. Then, instead of putting it in the fridge to set up, I was supposed to pour it into a cake pan and back it.

Can dyslexia translate beyond the written page and cause one to confuse left and right and get spoken directions backwards too?

Mud Cake aka Chocolate Pudding Cake
The REAL Recipe

1 Commercial chocolate cake mix
1 4 oz Packet of chocolate pudding. Must be the baking kind, plus the milk or water it calls for.

Follow directions on pudding package. When ingredients are mixed thoroughly, open and add the full cake mix.Follow temperature suggestions recommended for the cake mix, making sure to check the cake often to adjust for your oven and elevation. Test with toothpicks. When they come out clean, the cake is done.

This is a SUPER MOIST cake. If you plan to serve the cake on a different date from when you serve it, you must lightly dust the top with baking powder. Okay, if you make it the night before and take it to a party the next morning, we will count that as the same day. We are not talking actual calendar days, but common sense. This is especially crucial if you plan to store the leftover cake in plastic. The cake may get moldy very quickly because of the moisture content if you do not.

And I am still strongly discouraged from baking til this very day.   I think I should keep an open mind as I could have done better if I promoted them as the world’s most compact and harshest tasting brownies.   One could say that I achieved that.

Here is a very simple recipe that an eight year old should be able to make by themselves. However, because it is so simple, there are many ways for someone who overthinks things, such as myself, to make mush out of it.

Here is the premise:

Ingredients List:
1 Cup Sugar
1 Cup Peanut Butter
1 Egg

Mix the three ingredients in a bowl. With a spoon or whisk.

(Aside #1: Now, this is where the recipe went south for me once. I successfully cracked the egg and measured out very level and accurate one cup portions of the other 2/3 of the ingredients. Where I erred, is that I thoroughly mixed the egg and peanut butter. After I created he promising mix, I realized that my chemistry was off. I should have started with the egg and sugar.

What resulted, were dough balls that were reminiscent of gumdrops, with the sugar as the exoskeleton. A slightly gritty consistency. Okay…back to the recipe.)

Now, divide the portions up into 8-12 portions, depending on how large you would like to make the cookies. Although, I might add, nothing is stopping you from making one huge cookie. Place them on a cookie sheet.

I forgot to add that you need to preheat the oven or the toaster for this. DO NOT USE THE MICROWAVE. (I will say it again. Just don’t do it.) I *think* you would want to set the temperature at 350 or 450, but I really don’t remember. If you are used to baking, you will know what temperature it is supposed to be on.

(Aside number #2: A common mistake is to bake at the wrong temperature. Unless you check them every five seconds. They can quickly turn from mush to crispy in an instant so be careful.)

When they are all baked, take them out to cool.

(Aside number #3: I have to admit that half the time, the cookies turn out soggy and half the time they turn out like a hockey puck. There is a fine balance between leaving them very soft knowing that they will continue to bake on the inside while they cool, and taking them out too soon and basically eating peanut butter with raw egg drippings on it)

If my luck is on your side, you will get 5 really nice cookies out of these, 1 unfit for consumption, and 6 others that you would never serve, but you eat yourself out of mercy. You don’t want to waste food, after all.

Look on the bright side: It is a great way to fill up Grandma’s cookie platter and add the inviting smell of fresh baked cookies to your home.  Buy a cookie dough scented candle to cover up the evidence.